simplify connection checks for circleci api tests

[zainasir]

Describe changes proposed in this pull request:

• Simplify connection checks for circleci api tests

Checks

• The commit log is comprehensible. It follows 7 rules of great commit messages. We can fix this during merge by using a squash+merge if necessary
• Has tests or has a separate issue that describes the types of test that should be created. If no test is included it should explicitly be mentioned in the PR why there is no test.
• Is this PR adding logic based on one or more clinical attributes? If yes, please make sure validation for this attribute is also present in the data validation / data loading layers (in backend repo) and documented in File-Formats Clinical data section!
• Make sure your PR has one of the labels defined in https://github.com/cBioPortal/cbioportal/blob/master/.github/release-drafter.yml

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[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
0 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud